Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [77]
“Have you any idea why he might suddenly leave London?” Pitt looked around the table at each of them.
Tellman straightened to attention again.
Yeats frowned. “Could be anything from a woman to a bad debt,” he answered. He seemed about to say something more, then changed his mind.
“He had plenty of money,” the man with the quiff said, dismissing that idea.
“Not the sort of man to throw up everything on a romance either,” someone else offered.
“How sad,” Wilde murmured. “There should always be at least one thing in life for which one would sacrifice everything else. It gives life a sort of unity, a wholeness. And then you spend your time soaring and plunging between hope and terror that you never have to. To know that you will not—it would be as dreadful as to know you will. Have a glass of wine, Mr. Pitt.” He picked up the bottle. “I’m afraid we can’t help you. We are poets, artists, and dreamers . . . and occasionally great political theorists—of the socialist order, of course—except Yeats, who is tangling his soul in the troubles of Ireland, and that has no names an Englishman could pronounce. We have no idea where Bonnard is or why he went there. I can only say I hope he returns safe and well, and if you have to go and look for him, that it is somewhere with an agreeable climate, people who have new ideas all the time, and the last censor died of boredom at least a hundred years ago.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wilde,” Pitt said graciously. “I wish I could begin in Paris, but I’m afraid we know he did not take the Dover packet he was booked on, and I regret I have something uglier and more urgent to attend to than pursuing this any further.”
“Another judge?” Wilde enquired.
“No, a man found dead in a punt at Horseferry Stairs.”
Wilde looked sad. “Delbert Cathcart. I am very sorry. When you find who killed him, don’t forget to charge him with vandalism as well as murder. The unwitting fool destroyed a genius.”
Tellman winced.
“That kind of vandalism is not a crime, Mr. Wilde,” Pitt said quietly. “Unfortunately.”
“Did you know Mr. Cathcart well, sir?” Tellman spoke for the first time, his voice sounding a little hoarse and very different from those of the group around the table.
They stared at him in amazement, as if one of the chairs had spoken to them.
Tellman flushed, but he would not lower his eyes.
Wilde was the first to recover his composure.
“No . . . only saw him once, at a party somewhere or other. But I’ve seen quite a lot of his work. You don’t have to meet a man who is an artist in order to know his soul. If it is not there in what he creates, then he has cheated you, and worse than that, he has cheated himself.” He was still holding the wine bottle. “Perhaps that and cruelty are the greatest sins of all. I never spoke to him—or he to me—in the sense you mean.”
Tellman looked confused and crestfallen.
Pitt thanked them again and, finally declining the offer of wine, excused them both.
Outside in the dark alley, Tellman drew in a deep breath and wiped his hand over his face.
“I heard he was odd,” he said quietly. “Can’t say I know what to make of him. Do you think that lot have anything to do with Bonnard and Cathcart?”
“I don’t even know that Bonnard and Cathcart have anything to do with each other,” Pitt said grimly, and pulled his coat collar up as he turned along the alley, Tellman’s footsteps sounding hollowly after him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The nightmare was so real that even when the old lady woke up the room around her seemed to be the one in which she had spent her married life. It was a moment before her vision cleared and she realized